Late Edition
By Diann Blakely
Perhaps the reviewer's most time-worn trick is to meet an editor's word-count by overquoting from the text at hand. Including sentence after sentence, even whole paragraphs, pads a review and allows a sometimes-obvious escape from the work of summary and commentary, which require thought, often a great deal of it. Or, to put the matter another way, unnecessarily large amounts of quotation can allow a reviewer to avoid a job that can seem nearly impossible anyway: that of conveying a writer's uniqueness as it appears in printed language, and as it appears in a particular context. That uniqueness, paradoxically, brings to mind a central, unavoidable pitfall of the profession: how to convey a writer's individual diction and style—particularly when they are highly individualistic, even eccentric—without falling into that weird trap of mimicking them.
An advance review or three of Cormac McCarthy's new novel, No Country for Old Men (Knopf, $24.95), suffer from this problem: particularly for those with Southern or rural backgrounds, whole paragraphs read like enthusiastically laudatory parodies of McCarthy. There are several versions of the author to choose from: he isn't the same Cormac McCarthy he was at the beginning of his career. His characters, landscape, and plots possessed their greatest and creepiest integrity when he was in the caves of East Tennessee watching one of his characters stack up bodies or in Knoxville, his home town, catching the "flittermouses" or bats. Something went out of McCarthy when he abandoned humidity for the famously lithium-filled water of El Paso, where he moved in the late 1970s.
Yet even people who will find too much stylistically and technically in common between No Country for Old Men, his new book, and the recent bestselling border trilogy—All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain—are going to have a very hard time putting down the new volume after reading the opening monologue. Forgive me, but as I warned you at the start, sometimes lengthy quotation is the only way to get a certain point, or character, or style, or voice, across, and here is the monologue in full:
"I sent one boy to the gas chamber at Huntsville. One and only one. My arrest and my testimony. I went up there and visited with him two or three times. Three times. The last time was the day of his execution. I didnt have to go but I did. I sure didnt want to. He'd killed a fourteen year old girl and I can tell you right now I never did have no great desire to visit with him let alone go to his execution but I done it. The papers said it was a crime of passion and he told me there wasnt no passion to it. He'd been datin this girl, young as she was. He was nineteen. And he told me that he had been plannin to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was goin to hell. Told it to me out of his own mouth. I dont know what to make of that. I surely dont. I thought I'd never seen a person like that and it got me to wonderin if maybe he was some new kind. I watched them strap him into the seat and shut the door. He might of looked a bit nervous about it but that was about all. I really believe that he knew he was goin to be in hell in fifteen minutes. I believe that. And I've thought about that a lot. He was not hard to talk to. Called me Sheriff. But I didnt know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own definition has no soul? Why would you say anything? I've thought about it a good deal. But he wasn't nothin compared to what was comin down the pike.
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"They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. I dont know what them eyes was the windows to and I guess I'd as soon not know. But there is another view of the world out there and other eyes to see it and that's where this is goin. It has done brought me to a place in my life I would not of thought I'd of come to. Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he's real. I have seen his work. I walked in front of those eyes once. I wont do it again. I wont push my chips forward and stand up and go out to meet him. It aint just bein older. I wish that it was. I cant say that it's even what you are willin to do. Because I always knew that you had to be willin to die to even do this job. That was always true. Not to sound glorious about it or nothing but you do. If you aint they'll know it. They'll see it in a heartbeat. I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that. I think now that maybe I never would."
No Country For Old Men will be released on July 5th (one website is actually running a countdown). A notoriously private man who gives no interviews and refuses to pimp his book on talk shows and the like, doubtless McCarthy never expected to have his work end up on the silver screen, or on hundreds of thousands of DVDs. The characters/interviewees of Jean Hatzfeld's book Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24) probably expected the same sort of lifelong anonymity. The Hutu killers of the brief but unbelievably deadly genocidal civil war between the Hutus and the Tutsis—50,000 out of the latter's population of 59,000 were "cut," or murdered by machete—probably never expected to have their own words carefully recorded and transcribed.
Hatzfeld's book is no reprise of Hotel Rwanda, since it takes place in some of the most rural parts of the country, not a major city like Kigali. All of his killer interviewees were farmers before "the cutting," as they call it, and though the commentary of the author offers crucial information about Rwandan history, he wisely absents himself from much of the book and allows the men to tell their own stories. They are horrifying, in part because, even though some of the information is contradictory, all the men sound alike after awhile, as though killing murders the soul and the individuality it gives us. Here is a collection of sentences from Hatzfeld's rural "cutters":
Rule number one was to kill. There was no rule number two. It was an organization without complication.
First [time I killed someone] I cracked an old mama's skull with a club. But she was already lying almost dead on the ground, so I did not feel death at the end of my arm. I went home without even thinking about it.
I came upon two children sitting in the corner of the house. They were keeping quiet as mice. I asked them to come out; they stood up, they wanted to show they were being good. I had them walk at the head of our group, to bring them back to the village square...As leader, I had recently been given a gun....Walking along, without thinking, I decided to try it out...I shot twice at their backs. It was the first time in my life I had used a gun, because hunting is no longer customary [in the neighborhoods surrounding his village] since the wild animals disappeared. For me, it was strange to see the drop without a sound. It was almost pleasantly easy.
In the beginning we were too tired to think. Later on we were too used to it.
Hatzfeld writes: "Rwanda, famous land of a thousand hills, is above all a land of one vast village....After the genocide, many foreigners wondered how the huge number of Hutu killers recognized their Tutsi victims in the upheaval of the massacres, since Rwandan of both ethnic grounps speak the same language with no distinctive differences, live in the same places, and are not always physically recognizable by distinctive characteristics....The answer is simple. The killers did not have to pick out their victims: they knew they personally. Everyone knows everything in a village."
One may not know everything about the Hutu-Tutsi killings after reading Machete Season, but one feels a little less appallingly ignorant—not only about its internal conflict, but also about the origins and maturation of genocide.